TFBT: Hera the Oceanide

Joan V. O’Brien in The Transformation of Hera sees the ritual bath of Hera as a wide-ranging annual event at many Heraia co-located with water.  I am not sure if that is true, but is does raise some questions in my mind about Hera’s relationship with “rivers”.

·      Hera was raised by the greatest river of all;  

Hera addresses Aphrodite;  “Since I go now to the ends of the generous earth on a visit to Oceanus, whence the gods have risen, and Tethys our mother who brought me up kindly in their own house, and cared for me and took me from Rhea,” Homer, Iliad 14. 200 ff

·      Hera was nursed by the daughters of the River Asterion;

“Fifteen stades distant from Mycenae is on the left the Heraeum. Beside the road flows the brook called Water of Freedom. The priestesses use it in purification and for such sacrifices as are secret. The sanctuary itself is on a lower part of Euboea. Euboea is the name they give to the hill here, saying that Asterion the river had three daughters, Euboea, Prosymna, and Acraea, and that they were nurses of Hera…  This Asterion flows above the Heraeum, and falling into a cleft disappears. “ Pausanias 2.17.1-2

·      When Hera and Poseidon contested control of Argos, the rivers Asterion, Inakhos, and Kephisos voted for her. (Pausanias, Description of Greece 2. 15. 4)

·      Hera had a sanctuary at Sparta, erected to her at the command of an oracle, when the country was flooded by the river Eurotas. (Paus. iii. 13. § 6.)

·      O’Brien speculates that the pre-Olympic Hera was married to the river-god Imbrasus in Samos.  Some accounts say she was born on the banks of this river.  . (Apollon. Rhod. i. 187; Paus. vii. 4. § 4.)

·      Pausanias, (9. 10. 4-5)   Suggests an intimate relationship between the Spring Canathus and Hera.  In the same breath he recalls the Theban river -god Caanthus. 

  

I had assumed when I began this analysis that the marriage of Hera to the local river-god would represent the archetypal marriage of the local eponymous nymph to the local river-god.  Only there is not such archetype.  So maybe the motif of daughter of a river-god making good?  But, generally, Hera’s foster sisters the Oceanides are the eponymous nymphs and they rarely wed river gods.

So there we are; some random connections between Hera and the River, but no definitive association.  But, more associations than occurs with other goddesses.  What do you think?